Using the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett as primary intellectual guides, this interdisciplinary seminar will examine the many trajectories and themes of modernism in fiction, poetry, drama, art, dance and music. Throughout, we will closely examine the main philosophical and theoretical currents that informed 20th century modernism, especially those that would play a key role in the work of Joyce and Beckett, given that these influences were major contributions to modernism and postmodernism in general. Topics to be studied include: The Pre-Raphaelite movement, Nietzsche, Freud, Strindberg, Henri Bergson, Picasso, Klimt, Modigliani, Debussy, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Jean Cocteau, Schonberg, Virginia Woolf, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others.
Lectures
1. Introduction: Modern, Modernism, Modernity
2. The Early Modern I: From Renaissance to Enlightenment
3. Vico, New Science
4. The Early Modern II: The Eighteenth Century
5. The Early Modern III: Kant
6. Romanticism and the Romantic Movement
7. Hegel & Schopenhauer: Phenomenology and Existentialism
8. Joyce, Dubliners
9. Marx and Darwin & The Pre-Raphaelite Movement
10. Nietzsche and Freud
11. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
12. Bergson and Proust
13. Modernism and Poetry: Symbolism, Pound, Eliot
14. Joyce, Ulysses
15. Modernism and Music
16. Modernism and Dance
17. Modernism and Theater
18. Modern Painting: Picasso, Klimt, Modigliani
19. Beckett, Murphy
20. Modernity and the Novel
21. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
22. Beckett, Waiting for Godot
23. Beckett, Endgame & Act Without Words I
24. Conclusions: Beckett, Postmodernism and Posthumanism
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